The song Tha Spaso Koupes or Ehthes To Vradhi, a tsiftetelli dance tune, which was a favorite among the Greeks of Smyrna/Izmir and western Anatolia has remained a favorite to this day. Here are excertps from the oldest Greek recordings of this song (c. 1910) as well as a Turkish original.

Thursday, November 22, 2007

Truly a great influence for Costak came from Pasolini. The description from an upcoming retrospective explains why. Obvious isn't it?

Heretical Epiphanies | The Cinematic Pilgrimages of Pier Paolo PasoliniNovember 28 – December 4, 2007 at the Film Society of Lincoln Center

Pier Paolo Pasolini was many things––a poet, a provocateur, a devout Catholic, an ardent Marxist, an openly gay man: in essence, an “inconvenient guest,” as he put it, at the ongoing party known as modern society. He was also a filmmaker, unlike any other before or since. He began his career in movies as a screenwriter for Mauro Bolognini, Luciano Emmer and Federico Fellini, among others. When he directed his first film –– Accattone, in 1961 –– he more or less reinvented cinema from the ground up. The links to neorealism and New Wave modernism were there, but Pasolini’s hieratic moviemaking felt like no one else’s: imagistically and linguistically exacting (no one knew Roman slang better than Pasolini), unflinching in its vision of society’s castaways and human refuse, yet radically tender. Pasolini’s cinematic pageants of abjection, humiliation and fury were based in the devotional humanism of early Renaissance painting. From Accattone through the notorious updating of Sade’s "120 Days of Sodom" that he completed just before his murder on the outskirts of Rome in 1975, his body of work amounted to nothing less than a cry of anguish at what he saw as the horrors of progress, and a plea to return to the more humane rhythms of existence in a pre-industrial world. Pasolini stood alone, proudly and defiantly, and he stood for the common man.